In an interview with TIME last month, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula
da Silva sounded as calm as an afternoon on Copacabana. "The American
crisis," he said, "is an American problem that they will have to resolve."
A couple of weeks later, at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, a more
concerned Lula warned, "We cannot let the burden of the boundless greed of a few be shouldered by all."
Over the past week, however, it became clear just how much the "American problem" may affect Brazil's stellar economic performance,
as the Sao Paulo stock index — the Bovespa — lost about 20% of its
value. A visibly irked Lula barked that the U.S. disaster "is one of
the most serious problems we have ever seen." His parting shot: "Our
financial system is not involved in the [U.S.] subprime" mortgage mess
that sparked the catastrophe. "We did our homework and the U.S., who
spent 30 years telling us what to do, did not."
Such is today's surreal situation that Washington is getting lectured
on
capitalism by Lula, the head of Brazil's leftist Workers' Party. All
over a region once considered the poster child for economic
dysfunction, the refrain is the same: Why can't the gringos run an
economy as well as we do? Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Latin
America has been adopting the free-market economic reforms demanded by
the U.S. The "Washington Consensus" — more open markets, draconian cuts
in public spending, privatization of inefficient industries — has often
been blamed for exacerbating the continent's epic inequality. But most
Latin American countries now follow market policies. Some, especially
Brazil, have used them not only to create prodigious wealth but also to
redistribute it: 52% of Brazil's 190 million people now occupy the
middle class, up from 42% when Lula was first elected in 2002. Using
its windfall from high world commodities prices to tuck away a record
$215 billion in foreign reserves, Brazil has also built what it thought
were sturdy defenses against the global financial contagions that had
regularly waylaid it in the past.
Then came the mother of all Wall Street collapses, fueled by a toxic
cocktail of avarice and incompetence once common to the Latin American
establishment, and the continent's trust in Washington's free-market
model is once again in tatters. Lula and President Bush have spoken on
the phone twice since last weekend to reassure each other about their
countries' financial health. But the crisis is a shot in the arm for
the socialist project of the new Latin left, led by Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez. "Countries like Mexico, Brazil and Chile have
done everything expected of them macro-economically, but everyone
underestimated the size of this crisis," says Peter Hakim, president of
the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C. "Lula is very right to
point the finger of blame at the U.S. If the Venezuelas of the region,
which rejected market policies out of hand, come out better at the end
of all this than the Brazils do, the credibility of the Washington
Consensus will be sadly diminished."
The Washington Consensus had already taken a hit in 1995, during
Mexico's last peso crash, and in 2002, when the International Monetary
Fund, backed by the U.S., insisted on a strict currency policy that
worsened Argentina's economic collapse and led to its massive foreign
debt default. Since then, Argentina has thumbed its nose at the IMF and Washington, and has seen a dramatic recovery.
But as much as they may enjoy the shaming of the U.S. in the current
crisis, leftist crusaders like Chavez may take an even bigger hit from
the American debacle than more centrist governments like Brazil's will.
The financial meltdown is dragging commodity prices along with it,
which is bad news for leftist-run economies such as Venezuela's (oil)
and Bolivia's (natural gas). It may also have a negative effect on
Argentina's important agro-export sector. What's more, Bolivia and
Argentina, as well as others such as Nicaragua and Cuba, have come to
depend on Chavez's
petro-largesse, which stands to be greatly reduced this year and next
if
crude prices keep plummeting as they are now. "People forget how much
Argentina's recovery involved Venezuela's purchase of millions of
dollars in Argentine bonds," says Eduardo Gamarra, a Latin America
expert at Florida International University in Miami.
Brazil, whose $1.3 trillion economy is Latin America's largest and
ranked 10th in the world, also relies substantially on commodity
exports. But in contrast to his regional peers, Lula's
business-friendly policies have made the nation a rarity in Latin
America, more reliant on manufactured exports than on commodities.
That, along with a well-capitalized banking system and a strong balance
of payments picture "has buffered [Brazil] quite a bit against the
coming downturn," says Paulo Leme, director of emerging markets
research at the Goldman Sachs investment bank in New York. And while
Mexico relies on the U.S. market for 80% of its exports, Brazil sends
less than a fifth of its exports to the U.S.
Still, Brazil and Latin America again are in for yet another test of
their economic maturity. And it will be especially hard if the region's
new trading buddy, China — Chinese-Latin American commerce has grown
from less than $3 billion in 1990 to more than $70 billion today — sees
a downturn of its own in response to the global crisis. But if
capitalist-oriented economies such as Brazil's survive it, "the market
approach
could actually be bolstered in an ironic way," says Hakim, "meaning
that
countries like Brazil will look like the examples who managed
capitalism
better than the U.S. did." In that case, Washington and Wall Street
could find themselves berated by a new 'Brasilia Consensus.'
POST COMMENT BELOW:
WWW.TIME.COM
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1847976,00.html